


we're not broken just bent, and we can learn to love again.

by orphan_account



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Budding Love, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 03:53:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Battle scars show you fought for something, and it's still new for you. Give yourself time.” Effie doesn't know if she likes this new Haymitch who is all soft edges and muscles remembering how to be young.</i> Post Mockingjay, Effie centric.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're not broken just bent, and we can learn to love again.

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'just give me a reason' by p!nk. i wanted to write something much filthier than this, but it seemed to reach it's natural conclusion where it ended. there's nothing too graphic violence-wise, but this is your warning.

Back at home, at her parents house at least, her room had been painted the same pastel hues she had begun to favour towards the end of her time as an Escort. Something which had been a subconscious choice – Effie had grown tired of Katniss' withering looks, for as secretive as the girl thought she was, she was an open book to the woman – choosing muted tones and at least trying to be inconspicuous in her handling of the Quarter Quell. No one seemed to understand how much one could learn in a year, in a few weeks with the same people twenty four hours a day when those people were so utterly unashamedly different to anyone else she'd ever met. Her room was pastel (blue, she thinks, like the sky. Like the sky she'd missed so much when--), with an entire wall of windows, whitewashed desk and rocking chair, silver bed frame, white silk sheets. On her weakest days – curled under rough covers, chin tucked down against her knees like the five year old she wishes she still was, Haymitch pounding at her door then giving up and bringing Ms. Everdeen (she will never be anything else to Effie, who will never let go of Capitol manners and Capitol breeding) to coax her out with gentle words and promises that things will never be as terrible as she believes ever again – she misses that room. And oh, she misses her parents. She misses feeling safe and wanted and in her place. 

More than anything she misses feeling useful. Bitter nights bring her bitter thoughts with a blanket around her shoulders and half a mug of that awful clear grog he keeps in rows on top of a cupboard, when she thinks at least before the rebellion she had friends and a job and a chance. In the clear light of a hungover morning she will always, always regret these misguidances. But District Twelve has no place, no need, and no affection for Effie Trinket, the woman who led it's children to their deaths year after year after year and never did a thing besides smile and flutter and be the Capitol's idea of pretty. It takes three baths for Haymitch to work out that she's trying to burn her very skin off, and then he insists on supervising the boiling of the water. It would be touching, had she been rescued sooner. Had she been on Katniss' list. Had she been important at all come the end of the Games. Effie has not cried since she was freed, thinks that perhaps her tears were used up in captivity, soaking into dungeon floors and thinning the bloodstains on the uneven cobbles and slabs of slate she had started to call home. So unlike that pale and perfect room she remembered from her childhood. She watches him test the water with an elbow, her head held high, eyes dry and mouth set in an emotionless line. He has not touched her with this belated concern. And where once there would have been shame, she feels nothing in dropping her towel and climbing into the steaming water. Nowhere near hot enough.

If Haymitch has been worried about her lack of communication, he doesn't show it. Just sighs and pushes his hair out of his eyes, stands, gathers the towel from it's heap on the floor and folds it. Lays it out so she won't slip and break her neck.

Which would serve her right.

Ms. Everdeen prescribes her some sort of herb to drink, something to help bring her back from dungeons and water and excruciating bright light and shuddering creeping darkness. Effie has her doubts. Effie isn't sure she hasn't always been this way. She's just so tired all the time and nothing ever pulls her out of this sleepy foggy town she has found herself in, where everyone knows her name but no one knows who she is. They don't know about the rocking chair or the way the sun rose pinks and reds to stain her bedroom. They know about the stains on her hands, the years of ferrying tributes and never once fighting back. She knows the price of fighting back. Knows that there's no winning either way, just survival. Something Haymitch has said all along. She wishes she'd listened. Sinks down to her chin in misty, soapy water and runs her hands over her stubbly goose fleshed legs. They'd confiscated her razors, for whatever reason. It wasn't as though she was planning to slit anyone's throat in the night. She simply doesn't have the energy or the imagination to do so. 

She misses having smooth skin, though. They'd waxed her when they'd freed her and since then... well. She's covered in a honey coloured down from her knees to her ankles. Not that it matters. No one sees her legs these days anyway. Haymitch insists on humiliating her by bundling her up in his jumpers and hand-me-down leggings and hideous (if soft, comfortable, practical) brown boots. The wigs, she'd burned voluntarily. She still has her pride. Would not allow anyone else to throw the bundles of hair and glitter and feathers into the fireplace. Her pride, they had not managed to break. Oh, they'd tried. They'd broken so many other (fingers, toes, ribs, nails, spirit) things, but never her pride. One thing she'd been blessed with was an amazing sense of self worth. Something which was slipping from her hands now, with every damn day she was stuck in Twelve without a purpose, without anyone who looked at her with admiration or even a scrap of fondness. She caught pity, sometimes, from Peeta or Ms. Everdeen or even (God, how had it come to this) Haymitch. 

The tub allows her to submerge herself completely, hair floating around her head like weed, eyes tight shut against the sting as she blows bubbles out of her nose. 

It's only when she wakes up screaming herself hoarse that she realises she hasn't spoken in months. Why it's taken so long for the nightmares to start, she can't begin to guess, but now they're here she can't stop them. A week of startling awake in the murky twilight and she knows Haymitch has had enough because he breaks the lock off of her door and looks at her long and hard in the kitchen and she hadn't even wanted to come and live with him. She hadn't wanted to live with anyone at all. She hadn't wanted to live. Effie just watches him push his hair back, press his lips together, sip at the mug of coffee-and-scotch she'd seen him prepare. For a moment, she thinks he'll say something. Order her out. Tell her what a useless lump she's being. But he just sighs and shakes his head (“I'm so disappointed in you.” Her mother had said, when she'd gotten the Escort position. “Think of all that courting those young men have done, and for what?” But she hadn't wanted to be courted. She hadn't wanted any of it. She'd wanted the job), turns on his heel and picks up the feed bucket and leaves to see to the geese. Effie hates the geese. They hiss at her and cackle when she attempts to menace them away from her. 

The snap comes when Haymitch wraps a sturdy hand around her wrist, just to steady her hands as she sorts kindling from logs, halfway through a sentence when she slaps him with the hand he isn't holding. For a second, she doesn't know why she's done it, and she watches her fingerprints bloom on his cheekbone before she remembers (shackles and cuffs and ropes and hands with thin white fingers like bones like skeletons) and bursts into tears. There's that sigh again. Shifting his broad shoulders as he smooths a hand over his mouth and jaw, avoiding her marks on his skin, and then he's gathering her into his arms and lap. Threading his fingers through her hair so that he can touch the back of her scalp and press gently until she's ducked against his chest and the steady thrum of his heartbeat. He doesn't say anything, and nor does she, but they don't have to really. He'd won the Fiftieth Quarter Quell but she'd survived her own Games and they both had the scars to show for it.

“S'alright, sweetheart.” He mumbles half an hour later, when she has cried herself into hiccuping exhaustion, her cheeks tearstained and blotchy and her eyelids drooping against the thick wool of his jumper.

“In what way is this possibly alright?” Even though she's been screaming every night, the huskiness in her voice feels like it comes from disuse, and she pretends not to notice when his mouth brushes against her temple.

“Battle scars show you fought for something, and it's still new for you. Give yourself time.” Effie doesn't know if she likes this new Haymitch who is all soft edges and muscles remembering how to be young. But she doesn't miss his vomiting, so she says nothing, and wriggles away to stand and brush old ash off her knees. The kindling remains in an unlit pyramid in the fireplace. She doesn't look at it as she escapes to her bedroom and burrows under the duvet so that she can shut out his smell and the feel of his biceps straining to hold her tight.

It's barely dawn when she wrenches herself out of her nightmares, drenched in sweat, panicking again when she feels fingers on her forehead and almost falling out of the bed in her attempt to get away. Haymitch blinks at her from the gloom. He doesn't look like he's slept. Her handprint has started to bruise, and she feels something like remorse flicker in the pit of her stomach as she steadies her breathing and wipes beads of moisture from her forehead with the heel of one trembling hand.

“You were talking.” His voice is emery boards and nail files with none of the polish that comes with a manicure, and Effie sits up to rearrange the covers just so that she has something to do. So that she isn't vulnerable and fetal. So he won't have anything to use against her. When she doesn't reply he clears his throat, blunt fingers twitching in the sheets. “Do you want to--.”

“No.” And she never will. What they did is her business and her business alone, but she remembers her manners at the last moment. “Thank you, Haymitch, but I don't think it would do any good at all.”

“You slapped me.” Said like she owes him something. She does not. Draws her back straight to look him in the eye.

“Please don't trap my wrists so in future.” 

“Noted.” She's sure she sees something like understanding ebb and flow in his eyes. Relaxes her shoulders, and yawns, and curls back up because in the end the world holds so many threats and Haymitch Abernathy is not one. Not even when he lifts her duvet to slip in behind her and sling an arm over her waist. 

She sleeps peacefully until lunch time, and the geese start to honk, and somewhere in the depths of the part between waking and dreaming she thinks Haymitch kisses her forehead before he gets up.


End file.
